


(in another life) No Telling Who I Would Have Been

by SaintOfLostCauses



Category: Alex Rider - Anthony Horowitz, James Bond (Craig movies)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon, Crossover, Gen, M/M, and bond is honestly in over his head, in which alex grows up to be q, mrs. jones is m, smithers is his predecessor
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2017-11-05
Updated: 2017-12-12
Packaged: 2019-01-29 19:02:20
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 2
Words: 15,633
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12637239
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/SaintOfLostCauses/pseuds/SaintOfLostCauses
Summary: Alex Rider dies with nary a whisper of a prayer or eulogy to his name, and three weeks later Q gains a young, dark haired assistant with no name at all, whom he simply refers to as R.And life moves on. Save for all but Alex Rider, of course, who is irrevocably and utterly dead.





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> Song to listen to for this chapter: "Mustang Kids", by Zella Day
> 
> _The fact I'm still alive is why I still believe in miracles_

Alex Rider dies.

It’s an inevitability of time and circumstance, and the fact that he’d managed to survive as long as he _had_ was the sort of statistical marvel that Alex would have been tempted to write a paper on, had he the time to actually put pen to paper on the subject before said death, and had the data itself not been so very _very_ classified.

Hardly any of that truly mattered however, because Alex Rider dies… and all of his troubles die with him (as do the last stubborn utterances of the name Smithers through the halls of MI6, rather than Quartermaster or Q; the last of M’s directives set down from on high to be met by a deceptively polite, _Mrs. Jones,_ or even, _Tulip_ , if he’s feeling particularly combative).

Alex Rider dies with nary a whisper of a prayer or eulogy to his name, and three weeks later Q gains a young, dark haired assistant with no name at all, whom he simply refers to as R.

And life moves on. Save for all but Alex Rider, of course, who is irrevocably and utterly dead.

* * *

 

It begins in Smithers’ office, in one of the few quiet lulls between missions.

(It begins when Alex can’t even manage to go two months in America without being drawn inexorably back into MI6’s web of influence.)

Alex is sat with his arm outstretched across the desk and sleeve rolled up as Smithers makes some fine-tuning adjustments to a trendy, bulky sportswatch that’s supposed to provide MI6 with a live feed of his blood pressure and heart rate, as well as send out an emergency beacon should either of those numbers trip over some invisible threshold that Alex is honestly more comfortable not knowing the details of. The cool metal of the back of the watch face is pressed flush against the inside of his wrist and Alex flexes his fingers minutely against the tiny electrical shocks being applied to his nerve endings as the device tests his response levels.

He’s tempted to point out that it’s unlikely he’ll be allowed to keep his watch on should he be caught and tortured, but Smithers is already frowning down at him in quiet concern for applying what more or less equates to a particularly bad static shock in a controlled environment, and he isn’t terribly interested in seeing how much more distress he can cause the man. Particularly when even a poorly thought out safety net such as this one is still more than MI6 has ever bothered to send Alex out with before now.

(Jones has been handling more and more of Alex’s mission briefings alone, Blunt nowhere to be seen, and Alex would ask but there’s something to be said for not looking a gift horse in the mouth and while he’ll never precisely _trust_ Mrs. Jones she’s still indescribably preferable. _She,_ at least, seems to have some measure of investment in getting Alex back home again alive, if only to avoid having to go out and replace him. Between Jones’ peppermint scented empty platitudes and Smithers’ ever growing habit of slipping Alex extra gadgets under the table – _field tests, my dear boy, I can’t express enough the benefit of such things, you’re doing me a great service really –_ the amount of time that Alex spends in the hospital after each mission on average has reduced significantly. It still isn’t enough.)

Smithers strikes up a conversation about Alex’s leisure time in an obvious attempt to distract, though whether the target is meant to be Alex or Smithers himself is far less apparent, and Alex sighs softly and swallows down the initial impulse to ask _what_ leisure time, exactly, he’s talking about, because none of this is Smithers’ fault and it never has been. Instead he admits softly, after a moment’s pause to find the right words and order to arrange them in, “I’m really not sure.”

It’s remarkable, really, that he’s done as well in espionage as he has when he apparently can’t even handle _small talk_ properly.

One of the numbers Smithers is observing does something worrisome, if the drawn expression on the man’s face and the way he starts tapping away at the keyboard in front of him is any indication, and he isn’t looking at Alex when he says, “Try to regulate your breathing, we’re nearly done with all this fuss and then we can see about getting you home at a respectable hour.” And Alex’s breath catches sharply on the word home before he can quite stop himself, Smithers’ frown deepening with a lowly murmured “ _Alex_ ,” at whatever that does to his readout.

“Sorry.” Alex says, and tries to remember some of the breathing exercises Ben showed him on their last mission together after the older man had made the mistake of asking Alex if he was dating anyone and Alex had laughed so hard that he’d wound up hyperventilating.

“Better, better.” Smithers tells him after a moment, sounding pleased. He jots a few notes down in shorthand on a pad next to his monitor about blood oxygen levels and starts a scrolling task bar on the computer screen that slowly begins to fill. “Are you doing alright keeping up with your studies, my boy?” He asks as the program continues to load, spinning carefully in his chair to face Alex directly, face a clear portrait of concern. “Is that keeping you from taking advantage of any personal time you have?”

If only the answer was so simple. “Technically I’m still attending school in America, but it’s all through proxies and couriered lesson plans.” Alex says with a shake of his head. “I work ahead when I have the opportunity to, and their lesson plans are typically less demanding than Brookland so it isn’t too difficult to stay on top of things. Especially with a standing medical excuse to give me a more flexible deadline. But…”

Smithers doesn’t speak, but the careful arch of his brows is a clear invitation for Alex to continue.

“I guess I just don’t know what I’d even be interested in spending my free time with anymore.” He admits with a hapless shrug and another muted sigh. “Football maybe?” Even to his own ears, he doesn’t sound terribly enthused by the idea. Just tired. Resigned.

The silence from Smithers is awkward now, rather than inviting, as he turns to fiddle with some loose scraps of tech on the table next to him that Alex thinks is one day destined to become some sort of covert data stick. Drumming one hand against the tabletop and watching Smithers’ deceptively agile fingers tweak at wires and bits of plastic, Alex waspishly considers letting the silence stretch into the unbearable before ultimately deciding that he doesn’t have the energy for even that tiny rebellion.

Not against Smithers, at least. “What about you then?” He throws out without any sort of conscious consideration, and then has to pause and gather his thoughts sufficiently enough to follow the vein of his own question through. “What sort of thing do you like to do for fun on your off time?”

The way Smithers’ face actually _lights up_ at the question has Alex genuinely ashamed of his brief flirtation with pettiness a moment ago, and he resolves to attempt to bring the man back something interesting from his next mission, if he can. “Nothing too terribly exciting, I’m afraid.” He says, but sounds excited nonetheless. “I’m one of those boring old souls who likes to take his work home with him.”

“Yeah, exploding lawn gnomes sure sound boring.”

“ _Of course,_ your gear always proves to be some of my most interesting projects.” Smithers continues, practically beaming at him now. “But my specialty is really in armament, which...” His pace stutters nearly to a stop and he’s back to staring guiltily at Alex again, because even now MI6 still insists quite firmly on not equipping Alex with any sort of weaponry for his missions, which is the only reason any of this is actually news to Alex now. Alex is more annoyed by the pause in the flow of conversation than the cause of said delay, however.

He’s long ago resigned himself to MI6 treating him like a child only when it benefited them. Most days he’s even grateful to them for trying to keep guns out of his hands (as if Jones is still holding a grudge against him for that time he tried to kill her). It’s one of the only things he can actually agree with Blunt about. Alex lifts his hand from the table between them to tap lightly on the plastic face of his watch to draw Smithers’ attention there. “Have you ever added any attunements like this to any of your weaponry?” He asks, equally out of curiosity and a desire to make the man stop looking at him like that.

Either way, it works. Better than even he could have hoped, really. Smithers keeps him in the lab discussing potential alterations so far past his appointment time that Alex is actually forced to leave through one of the man’s secret escape routes to avoid being seen by a Double O coming in for his own gear. Alex is already halfway home before he realizes he still has the watch on, but figures if MI6 wants it back they’ll certainly know where to find him. And if he makes a stop off at a Maplin for a cable to plug into the watch so he can get a closer look for himself at those numbers Smithers had been so busy with earlier?

He’s only attempting to find himself a new hobby, MI6 can hardly fault him for _that_.

So long as they don’t find out, anyway.

* * *

 

They find out, of course they do.

Alex has yet to confirm it, but he’s reasonably certain the flat they’ve put him up in since dragging him back to the country is bugged - though what they expected to see before now aside from long study sessions and too many depression naps, Alex hasn’t the faintest idea. Or even who in MI6 would have both the clearance and the _time_ to review such monotonous recordings (though if pressed Alex would lay his money on Crowley, who had started making noise in recent days about reading in at least one member of the psych branch on Alex’s file so he could be made to sit a session or two).

Rather than faulting him, however, Smithers is positively _thrilled_ by the news. He begins calling Alex in at least once a week, missions outstanding of course, to discuss upgrades, flaws, and simply to familiarize Alex with the subject matter directly. A subject matter that Alex finds himself picking up at a nearly exponential rate, each lesson cascading down a dozen new routes of potentiality until Alex is forced to start seeking out reference material on his own time in order to keep up with his own rapidly burgeoning interest and ideas.

It’s not an interest Alex had ever really seen himself pursuing before now, but he’s inarguably _good_ at it once he gets going and it’s even something he can enjoy in relative isolation, which suits his current lifestyle quite well.

Blunt is, unsurprisingly, skeptical of the whole thing but ultimately unconcerned with what Alex chooses to do with his life outside of his missions; Jones, on the other hand, is almost _enthusiastic_ in her encouragement of their lessons, at least by her standards anyway.

She even pulls a few strings to get Alex signed up for specialized classes at a nearby college in his time off between missions. Half the class thinks he does under the table stunt work to pay for his fees (apparently, there’s a young actor that looks enough like him for this to actually be plausible) and the other half is convinced he’s being abused at home. They’re all wholly too self-absorbed to actually make an effort of asking him about his injuries though, which suits Alex just fine in the end.

(Three months in and the professor still thinks his name is _Adam,_ though that might have been because he’d had a broken wrist for two of them and his handwriting had suffered remarkably from it.)

Whether she’s motivated by a genuine interest in Alex furthering his education or sheer guilt, he honestly can’t be sure, but neither can he truly bring himself to _care_. It’s something he chose for himself, the _only_ thing in his life recently that he’s really had a choice in, and barring one minor case of electrocution early on that hadn’t even required a trip to hospital it’s hardly even a dangerous one.

Carefully, quietly, Alex plants the seeds of the tiniest measure of control in a life that he had lost control of long before he’d even realized it. And he begins to cultivate it.

All he has to do now is sit back and wait to see what sprouts.

* * *

 

It’s a brave new world out there, Smithers likes to tell him each time they brainstorm some new and interesting piece of tech together in the lab over a pot of tea, which while perhaps a bit overly earnest in its delivery is preferable at least to the impulsive hugs that he’d dispensed the first half dozen times. (Alex only punches the man in reflex _once_ , which he rather considers a remarkable measure of restraint, but that one slip in control is enough at least to convince the man to find less physical ways of expressing his excitement in the future.) It has the added benefit of being an accurate assertion, even.

It takes him nearly a year to figure out what that means for him, though.

Things within MI6 change dramatically the day that Blunt is rather firmly encouraged to retire and Jones takes up the post in his stead. Alex is in the middle of a mission in Blackpool of all places when the changes begin, so he’s forced to hear about them secondhand after the fact from a bed in medical once he’s managed to wake from a three-week long coma.

Ben relays all of this to him with an expression of brash relief on his tired face. About the administrative restructuring, the budget allocations, the division expansion, division down-sizing, the home office _relocation_ of all things. And perhaps most importantly, Ben tells him about Agent Alex Rider becoming declared eligible for retirement.

If Alex hadn’t already been hooked up to an oxygen mask at the time, he probably would have lost his breath at the news. Ben doesn’t think his joke is very funny when he tells him as much in writing, and Alex spends the rest of the afternoon writing increasingly morbid puns on a hospital napkin until the older man is forced to admit his defeat between hiccupping bouts of laughter, clutching at his sides in pain.

It doesn’t take very long after that for a nurse to show up and usher Ben out with a bit of exasperated chiding about needing his rest. Even after he answers questions about how he’s feeling (like he got hit by a train, and apparently the nurse doesn’t enjoy his particular brand of macabre humor either, but then, Alex hadn’t exactly enjoyed being hit by the train at the time, and now _everyone_ gets to deal with his completely healthy coping mechanisms) and is left alone with nothing but his own thoughts and the low buzzing drone of the overhead lights to distract him, Alex continues to cling stubbornly to consciousness.

There’s plenty for him to think about in light of the news, after all (like what he’s even going to _do_ with himself if dying slowly for his country isn’t his only option anymore), and after three weeks straight of sleep already he’s loathe to just jump back into it and risk another three so soon, even if he’s well aware that’s not how any of this actually works.

He’s still absolutely terrified by the idea of never waking up again, which is an almost novel experience in its own right, since he thought he’d stopped caring about that sort of thing a long time ago. Remarkable what even the tiniest glimmer of hope can do to a person after so long without any at all.

The next time he wakes (with absolutely no recollection of actually falling asleep, but a quick glance at the calendar on the wall to reassure him that it’s been less than a day since he did), Mrs. Jones is sitting at his bedside, hands resting neatly in her lap and waiting patiently to discuss his options with him.

In the end, Alex honestly has very little choice in the matter at all.

It’s a brave new world out there, after all, and the organization that doesn’t adapt or change with the times will eventually eat itself alive from the inside out. And Jones is all too prepared to do just that.

Adapt or devour.

‘Mrs. Jones’ is the first casualty of the change, crushed down into fine crystalline shards of peppermint and reshaped into the anonymous and keen edged M, something of Blunt’s blurred grayness draped across her shoulders like a cloak and making it difficult to look at her directly as she speaks, as she explains that Alex Rider simply has too many enemies to sink into obscurity like he might have once hoped for.

Smithers is the next to fall in line, hovering anxiously at the door of medical as Jones, no, _M_ , continues to speak, gifting Alex with one of his appropriately encouraging smiles each time his gaze slides inevitably away from M. Fat suit nowhere to be seen and Smithers no longer, but rather the Quartermaster; but that smile is still the same, still manages to anchor Alex in the swell and flood of M’s words. Words like ‘new identity’, ‘close eye nonetheless’, ‘your own protection’, and ‘assistant’.

And Alex? There’s simply not enough of himself left whole after two years of being ground again and again beneath the unforgiving heel of Her Majesty’s Secret Service to be reshaped into something new.

He just gets devoured.

* * *

 

Nobody mourns him. There’s nobody left for that sort of thing, and under the circumstances it’s honestly preferable, since it means nobody is looking either. Resurrection is a far more successful feat when nobody truly understands that’s what they’re looking at, after all.


	2. Chapter 2

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Creating R is a process.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Song to listen to for this chapter: "Watercolor - Remixed", by Timesbold
> 
> _Time makes excuses and enemies_

Creating R is a process that starts the moment M walks out of medical without a backwards glance and Q takes her place next to the bed instead.

The first step is smuggling Alex out of MI6 under the artifice of a body bag. It’s not the first time that MI6 has faked his death, or even the second, but it’s the first time he’s been actively involved in the process, and the experience itself is entirely unsettling. The total darkness that seals around him after he’s zipped up is heavy, suffocating, and for a few minutes near the end of the transfer he thinks he might actually be dead. That _this_ is death; an indistinguishable expanse of nothingness in front of him, the thunderous sound of his own breathing in his ears, the overwhelming scent of antiseptic burning his sinuses and… relief.

And then he’s staring up at Crowley’s faintly worried face in the back of an ambulance, and the lights are too bright and his chest _aches_ because according to Crowley he had stopped breathing there near the end. “Okay.” Alex says wearily, pushes himself up onto shaky elbows and asks, “Can I get out of this bag now?”

Crowley hurries to help him out as carefully as possible and settle him back down onto the bed after. “Do you want to talk about—” He begins, with that same odd sort of expression that he’s had every time he tried bringing up therapy to Alex in the past year.

“I’d honestly rather jump in front of another train, Crowley.”

The agent’s mouth goes flat, eyes shuttered, but he studies Alex quietly for a beat and only says, “It’s Tanner now. Bill Tanner. You’ll need to remember that when you come back.”

“I thought the whole point of this cloak and dagger nonsense was that I won’t be coming back.” Alex says, eyes rolling in his head to settle on his own upturned wrist, paler and thinner than he remembers after three weeks in bed; follows the line of the IV up to the bag hanging from a hook overhead. Hydration probably, or at least, it certainly wasn’t morphine. “Don’t worry though, whoever I am in my next life will be sure to address you appropriately.” He attempts a cavalier sort of wave only to run out of steam halfway through the gesture, hand dropping back to the bed with a dull thump.

(Muscle atrophy was the absolute worst part of prolonged hospital stays, in Alex’s opinion. Though the inevitable but ultimately hollow line of get well cards littered about his room was a close second.)

“I know what I’m doing, I’m not fourteen years old anymore, you know.” He adds, doing absolutely nothing to disguise the bitter irony in his voice. Crowley simply sighs and looks down to consult the open file in his lap rather than engage, and Alex angles his head slightly to get a glimpse at the papers as well. His gaze lands on a line detailing the location of his future burial plot, and he briefly entertains the idea of taking a walk across his own grave once all of this is over, just for the novelty of it.

Crowley shuffles a few papers and Alex finds himself looking at a list of vetted safe houses instead, which is infinitely less interesting in his estimation but still more information than MI6 is typically willing to give him without a fight, so he commits the addresses to memory anyway. The next page has the specifics of his most recent injuries, which Alex has absolutely no desire to read about at all, but Crowley lingers on this page far longer than the previous ones. Alex opens his mouth to ask the man if there’s a particularly difficult word he needs help with, when Crowley abruptly says: “For all intents and purposes, at the hospital you will have to be. Fourteen again, that is.”

And Alex exhales noisily instead, cutting an irritable look across to the agent. “Time for the briefing then, is it?”

If there was one thing about MI6 that Alex could almost bring himself to admire in the people he’d interacted with until now, it was their ability to appear totally unflappable in any situation, untouched and unwavering. It was something Alex would have liked to try cultivating in himself, but he always felt things too strongly to successfully quiet that part of himself, and he always wound up hurt as a result. Crowley raises a single eyebrow at Alex and nods once, expression a portrait of stillness, and Alex feels something in his chest burn at that placidity, throat clogging with his own emotions until he’s choking on the anger.

He closes his eyes and swallows it all down like a hot stone dropping into the pit of his stomach. Slowly, steadily, that heat pulses throughout the rest of his body, warming in little pinpricks of sensation that chase the chill and numbness from his limbs. When he opens his eyes again, that churning, burning vortex is veiled by a thin veneer of calm, brittle and sure to crack under the slightest application of pressure. Alex decides to be the first to press. “What letter have you lot decided to saddle me with, then?” He asks, tone nearly imperious in its mockery.

Crowley’s silence is all too telling and all too promising. Or perhaps threatening was a more appropriate word.

Alex goes cold, then hot all over again, and all of his emotion comes bubbling up through the rapidly forming cracks in his shield in a scalding torrent of words. “You’re joking. _I_ was joking. You can’t be serious, I thought it was America that liked its alphabet agencies, are you lot trying to get the highest score in _scrabble_ or something?”

“If that were the case, we would have stuck you with X or Z. Something with a higher point base than R in any case.”

R. To follow Q, which was apparently what he would be doing with himself now that MI6 couldn’t afford to put him out in the field anymore. R for Rider. He’s not sure if he appreciates the opportunity to take some small token of himself with him into his new life, or loathes it. Perhaps that’s something he’ll only figure out in due time. “Fine. Whatever. At least tell me I get a name too.” Alex says wearily, giving in far sooner than he’d like to but already struggling to shrug off the creeping tendrils of sleep draping themselves over him like a warm, weighted blanket.

Crowley shuffles a new paper to the front and consults it briefly before looking up again. “You’ll go by the name Peter Burton in hospital. Q will be visiting regularly as your uncle Boothroyde while he helps you construct your new identity. Should you be interested in continuing your education past Q’s own tutelage, you’ll be registered as a Desmond Llewelyn. Your new flat will be rented out under the name Geoffrey Bayldon.”

“Okay, but which name is actually going to be _mine_?”

More silence.

Alex feels his ire rise like a fever, temporarily banishing all thoughts of sleep. “I’d ask if I only get a letter because you lot used up the last dregs of your creativity coming up with ‘Bill Tanner’ in all its wonder, but you just listed _three different names_ and I don’t get to keep any of them.”

The look Crowley gives him is far too perspicacious for his comfort as he asks, “Do you want any of them?”

No. Of course he didn’t. And Crowley was all too aware of that fact, which infuriates and unnerves him in equal measure. Alex resolves that if he has any control over what sort of person he becomes after this, he’s going to shape himself into something that MI6 won’t be able to predict quite so easily. For now, however… “That’s hardly the point.”

“It rather is.” Crowley contends mildly, shuffling his pages one final time before flipping the file closed and setting it on the bench beside him, reach down for a vinyl bag at his feet and placing that in his lap instead. “You’ve shown a proven lack of interest in holding onto assumed identities on missions in the past. We figured keeping a name straight on top of everything else right now might be asking a bit much of you.” He opens the bag and pulls out a small tube that Alex instantly recognizes as one of Smithers’ inventions. “One letter seemed like a good place to start.”

“If anyone in your life ever told you that you’re funny, they were lying to spare your feelings.” Alex tells him, eyeing the tube with something approaching weary resignation.

Crowley stands and shuffles closer to Alex in the confined space, popping the top off the tube with his thumb. “I don’t need to be funny, I work for the government.” He says. “You know what this is, don’t you, Alex?”

“Long lasting hair color stain. Naturally darkens your existing hue rather than introducing an entirely new color to the follicles.” He rattles off impassively, conscientious of the fact that he’s staring at the metaphorical epitaph of his life as Alex Rider, but simply too tired to care anymore. “Useful for deep undercover because even if an agent doesn’t have the chance to reapply the stain their hair will seem to fade naturally, like it’s been bleached by the sun. Far less likely to arouse suspicion in the long run.”

The agent nods once, adding, “With the added benefit of dry application, for those times where water might be difficult to get ahold of or too messy to use; lying in the back of a moving vehicle, for example. Your hair has been steadily darkening on its own over the years, of course, and if you’re lucky in a few more years’ time you won’t even need this anymore. But until then…” He takes a step forward, all but looming over Alex now but expression gentle. Almost… kind.

Alex hates this look of Crowley’s most of all, really. He closes his eyes to avoid having to look at it any longer and silently vows to make sure that Bill Tanner never has any call to use it on R.

“I’ll apply it for you this first time, Alex, while you’re still recovering. After that it will be on you to keep up with it, but for now just try to get some sleep.” Crowley says and something cold slicks into his hair, followed quickly by combing fingers. “You’re going to be very busy very soon, after all. Best for you to get your rest while you still can.”

“Were you trying to sound ominous just now or is it just natural talent?” Alex asks with a soft breath of laughter, growing drowsier by the second despite his best efforts. Inevitability was something even he couldn’t fight for long, apparently. Not even at his most stubborn.

“An unavoidable side effect of mourning, I suppose.” The agent says softly, hardly pausing to consider his words and hands not missing a beat. “I know you probably don’t want to hear this from me, Alex, but I am rather fond of you. We all are. And I’m sure that I’ll come to like R just as well in time but it doesn’t diminish the loss any _now_. I’m going to miss you.”

“… you’re right, I didn’t want to hear it.” Alex says dully, after a long stretch of quiet as he lets those words turn over in his mind. “What about you though? Was Crowley the cover? Or is that what Tanner is for?”

Crowley’s fingers still in their ministrations and in the silence Alex can hear the man breathe deep and exhale a sigh. “Does it matter?”

Alex considers the question quietly for a moment as the gentle massaging picks up again, letting the steady motion lure him right to the edge of a sleepy precipice. “Not really.” He says, takes a deep breath, and lets himself fall.

* * *

 

Q is his only visitor in hospital while he’s recovering from what the staff have all been told was a very nasty car accident.

The nurses are all kind and attentive, and R is just stilted and awkward enough in his initial responses to their questions that they decide that he’s shy, a label he turns over in his head in consideration for nearly a full day before discarding it as impossible to maintain in the long run. He does, on the other hand, quite like the idea of being underestimated in all aspects of his being, rather than just the physical. His interactions with the nursing staff remain politely skittish, and he quickly becomes something of the darling of his ward, nurses and doctors alike finding reasons to stop by and leave him little treats or words of encouragement during grueling PT sessions.

He requests a small, handheld mirror from his ‘Uncle Boothroyde’ during his second visit and spends quiet moments alone in his room practicing expressions in the mirror until they become instinctive. Wide eyed fragile looks, fluttering airs of nervous distraction, and most importantly, an implacable serenity in the arch of his eyebrows and cant of his mouth. An armor of placidity between himself and his temper, his impulsiveness, his despair.

The last one, at least, he has experience drowning out in a wash of sheer stubborn static. The rest will follow in time.

And time is something he has an abundance of now. That and Twix bars from the hospital vending machine, because he made the mistake of telling one nurse he liked them and now he gets at least four of the things a day and honestly? He’s sort of sick of them now. R makes a game of seeing how many bars he can hide on Q’s person during his daily visits without the man noticing. His fine motor control improves in leaps and bounds outside of physical therapy, and one day Q goes home with no fewer than nine candy bars hidden somewhere on his person.

On Q’s first visit, he brings R a small notebook, ostensibly in an attempt to help a wildly creative nephew keep himself entertained outside of visiting hours. R makes little notes in it throughout the day: personality quirks, physical affectations, hobbies, likes and dislikes, even possible patterns of speech and diction that he would like to try adapting to his new identity.

He pens it all in cursive, something he’d never particularly enjoyed using before, writes and rewrites pages of pages of notes until he’s satisfied with the handwriting, until it comes naturally.

Q looks over the notes on his next visit, offers his own opinions on each of them, and then spends the next three hours discussing a new security update he’s currently involved in installing at the new headquarters. R looks over a set of schematics on a tablet that he’s reasonably certain was never supposed to leave the labs and makes a few suggestions of his own. At the end of the visit Q asks him if he’s interested in getting his A levels, and R flips to one of the back pages of his notebook to show the man a carefully compiled list of subjects.

The next time Q stops by, he drops off a pile of prep books, a personal tablet pre-loaded with an assortment of self-study programs, and a Word-A-Day calendar. He’s pretty sure the last one is a joke, but he memorizes every word and uses the sheets as bookmarks after, makes a point of using at least three new words in conversation each time Q visits. The day Q brings him a pile of old Shakespeare recordings and spends the entire visit coaching R on his vowels, R utters the word _ignominious_ with such perfect elocution and poise that Q stutters to a stop in the middle of his response to stare, dumbfounded.

When he finally notices the word displayed on the calendar set on his bedside table an hour later, Q proceeds to call him both a menace and a brat and R laughs hard enough to start hyperventilating. He mouths the words ‘worth it’ through the oxygen mask forced on him afterward, even if it does put an early end to lessons for the day.

Some visits they do nothing but speak in French, some days Q brings a prototype invention along and lets R take it apart and put it back together again to see if it still works after. Once, it works _better_ after, which had been wholly an accident on R’s part, but Q excitedly spends the next twenty minutes taking it apart again to figure out what he had done differently to make that happen, and they both wind up learning something that day.

Another day, Q brings up extended wear contact lenses and has R test out a few colors before finally settling on a sort of greyish green hue. He studies his reflection in the mirror quietly for a moment, remembers a joke Sabina once made, and asks Q if he can have the lenses make his vision worse. Q, slightly dubious, confirms that he can, and they spend the next half hour discussing glasses frames. And the hour after that discussing possible upgrades for the frames, where R is forced to draw a firm line against having any sort of explosive sitting on his face.

(The joke is this: Back on his first day of school in America, Sabina had laughingly suggested he remake himself here, shoved a pair of her father’s reading glasses onto his face and said that they very nearly managed to disguise how handsome he was, but only just. It hadn’t wound up doing him any good back then, but maybe this time around things would be different.)

* * *

 

His first day out of the hospital, Q takes him shopping for a new wardrobe.

Which honestly tests the very limits of R’s passive compliance with the state of things up until now, though it takes three shops, one hour, and absolutely nothing to show for their trouble (he’d never really given much thought to what he wore before, so figuring out what _R_ would wear has been a trial for which he was not adequately prepared) before his patience finally runs out.

“I certainly don’t mean to sound ungrateful Q, but this does seem to be a _touch_ below your paygrade. In fact, I would go so far as to say that all of this has been rather below your paygrade as of late.” He says, choosing his words with extreme precision. His voice still sounds vaguely unfamiliar, but each word comes out feeling more comfortable than the last and he’s nothing if not adaptable.

Q gives him a look that seems to be equal measure amused and he silently ushers R out of the main flow of foot traffic, lingering just at the entrance of a well-lit but narrow alleyway. “I think you’ll find that the extremely limited pool of individuals with the proper security clearance to be here with your right now are all distinctly overqualified for the work.” He says, one eyebrow raising significantly when he adds, “would you rather it was M with you here today?”

R shudders in response, cutting a darkly disapproving look the older man’s way; catches a glance of his reflection in a shop window past Q’s shoulder and rather fancies the effect his new glasses have on his whole demeanor.

“Certainly, Tanner would have perhaps been more appropriate for today’s excursion.” Q continues with a low chuckle at R’s expense before allowing his expression to fall into something more somber. “But I admit that I’m being a bit selfish right now – I _want_ to be here with you, my dear boy. And I thought you might appreciate having a friend around right now. Was I wrong?”

As unobtrusively as possible, R studies his reflection further in the window as he frowns in response to Q’s question. There’s a certain air of judgmental authority that comes through in even that thoughtless gesture, and he tries a few more looks on for size as he explains his concern. “I feel as if I’m wasting your time.” He says, brushing a loose bunch of grown out curls away from his eyes and squinting at himself over the rim of his glasses and getting nothing but a smear of colors across his vision for his trouble (apparently, Q had chosen to make his prescription remarkably strong). “I don’t even know what I’m looking for, I’ve never bothered to give much thought to what I wore before.”

“And that sort of mindset happened to benefit your image at the time, which is why nobody ever bothered to bring it up to you.” Q agrees, apparently noticing R’s distraction in the window and placing one heavy hand on his shoulder to draw his attention fully back to the conversation. R meets his eyes with only minor hesitance but glances away again in a rapid flutter of lashes a moment later. “But now it’s time to start thinking about first impressions and what you want your clothes to say about you to the men and women of MI6.”

“What does it matter what my clothing says? I can speak well enough for myself without their input.” He’d worked tirelessly for the past three weeks to be able to do just that, in fact.

“The majority of them are going to _see_ you long before they get the chance to actually speak with you. And they’ll be hard pressed later to shed any assumptions they make about you in that first glance. Government work hardly breeds flexibility, after all. Intellectually, at least.” He slants a knowing smile at R and adds in a low, amused tone, “present company excluded, of course.”

R’s smile back is small and preoccupied as he considers his options. Ideally, he should dress to fit the identity he’s been carefully constructing, about the sort of image that person would wish to present at first glance. The image itself didn’t need to be accurate, so long as it was what he wanted other people to believe. In a way, it was it was a bit like going undercover, and in that at least he has some measure of experience. He just has to imagine he’s looking at a dossier on R as he currently stands and work from there.

What does he have?

An upper-class background, poise, a self-confidence that borders into sheer ego but with the intelligence and ingenuity to back it up. The youngest person in the room at all times, and desperate to be taken seriously. Yet still willing to take full advantage of any person foolish enough to underestimate him for it. So he dresses to look older, but not _too_ much older. Old fashioned, ill-fitting suits, cardigans, oversized jackets, colors and patterns. Maybe even corduroy. And boots.

“Boots?” Q questions faintly after he relays his wardrobe requirements to the man, taking R’s arm and turning him down a street that presumably has what they’re looking for. “What do those say about you, then?”

“They say I want to be able to run if I have to.”

On his second and third day out, he sits for his A levels wearing his newly purchased clothes. He gets a few odd looks for it, certainly, but everyone in the room has far more important things to worry about at the moment than the fact that he’s a bit overdressed, and he needs to feel comfortable in these clothes before he debuts at MI6 officially.

(R won’t get his results for months at least unless MI6 decides to meddle, but that will give him time to get settled in his new job in the Q branch before he has to start worrying about university. He has plenty else to worry about for now.)

Day four finds him being presented with an ID badge with his picture and the letter R in bold font underneath and following Q’s well-worn heels deep down into the bowels of the building; past a row of people set at a bank of computers, past a work table littered with half-finished projects, the skeleton of an Aston Martin, and back into Q’s office, where the door is firmly closed and he’s offered a seat, a mug of hot tea, and a kind smile.

“Are you ready?” Q asks him, gaze skating over his shoulder and out the office window, and R willfully resists the urge to turn in his seat and find out how many of the staff are currently busy forming their first impressions of him at a glance.

He firms his posture instead, steels his gaze, and allows a brief show of nervousness in the way one hand flutters up to brush hair from his eyes before nodding once and upsetting the whole mess into his eyes all over again. R huffs out a laugh and offers Q a wry smile over the rim of his mug. “Do you honestly believe that I would tell you if I wasn’t?”

“Then get out of my office and get to work.” Q tells him with fond alacrity, making a shooing gesture with one hand and flipping open a file on his desk with the other.

R stands smoothly, mug clenched tight between both hands. “Fine, but I’m keeping the tea.”

Q answer is untroubled and is delivered without even bothering to look up from his file. “My dear boy, that was my intention all along.”

Once he’s stepped out from the office and found his own desk (firmly ignoring the rapid shuffling of employees reorienting themselves to pretend they hadn’t just been lurking) R takes a quiet moment to himself to gather his bearings and gets a closer look at the tea mug that Q had foisted off onto him so suddenly.

It’s a scrabble themed mug for the letter R. Of course it is.

“Tanner was right, the letter R is hardly worth anything at all.” He says softly to himself, and in a lot of ways, that’s honestly preferable.

* * *

 

He settles into the work quickly enough, it’s the people that give him pause.

There’s a shift in thinking for the work, certainly, a new mind space that R finds himself trying to navigate while he’s drawing up plans and blueprints. He’s all too familiar with the sort of gear that a child can get away with hauling around on his person without arousing suspicion, but adults are a different matter entirely.

That wasn’t to say that the habits of a child came easily to him either, but he had spent so long pretending as if they did that to shift gears so abruptly was something akin to a culture shock for him. Thankfully, after they’d all gotten their obtrusive ogling out of the way on the first day, the rest of the Q branch staff seem all too eager to help him find his feet. It’s hardly surprising, considering that the Quartermaster had apparently had a say in the hiring process for every single one of them, though Q firmly insists that the steady supply of tea and biscuits that find their way to his desk is solely R’s doing.

(R considers the nursing staff at the hospital and the Twix Problem and finds he can’t really argue with the man.)

They’re more than willing to answer any probing questions he has about accessories, brand names, locales, or the agents that they’re meant to supply to, and even make a habit of cc’ing him every new piece of intel that comes in, to better help him stay informed. He gets to know each and every one of their names and something of their homes or hobbies, but all anyone ever manages to get out of him is a letter and a heavy, reluctant silence whenever they try to bring up the past. It’s not a fair trade and he hates it honestly, but he doesn’t have much say in the matter either.

Nobody seems to begrudge him his demurral though. Rather, they’re apparently all too eager to fill his silence with their own wild suppositions, some of them so strange that they very nearly approach the truth. A betting pool quickly forms, and R simply laughs when Q asks him if he’d like for him to put a stop to it. “They aren’t harming anyone.” He dismisses with a loose shake of his head. “Though some of the staff have clearly missed their true calling as fiction writers.”

They treat him like he’s young, but they don’t treat him like he’s a child. R hadn’t been aware before now that there was any real difference between the two, but he’s learning something new every day and that’s one of them. He has the freedom to make _choices_ now. Not just about what he’d like to eat for lunch that day, or whether to wear a cardigan or the corduroy, but real ones.

(Just so long as they don’t involve being honest about himself, of course.)

Dare he say it, he starts getting comfortable.

He begins taking university classes via computer about three months in. It takes some getting used to, working regular, semi-consistent hours in TSS and taking classes at an accelerated rate (there are upgrades to MI6’s cyber security and digital reconnaissance that R would like to implement _now,_ only he doesn’t quite have the technical knowledge yet to know how to accomplish them, and patience is something he’s only learned how to _fake_ in his new life, not embrace) and he’s exhausted more days than not his first semester whenever he drags himself down to the workshop.

The staff take to leaving real meals on his desk when he’s not looking, rather than simply tea and sweets, and once when he makes the mistake of resting his eyes at his desk for a few minutes, he wakes up several hours later to find a blanket draped over his shoulders and a pillow under his head. A new pool takes up about the source of his fatigue, and R genuinely laughs himself sick over the one about having a demanding lover, and has to leave work early that day.

“Maybe he’s got a new pet and he’s busy house training it?” Imogen suggests to Rhys in a low, hushed voice over the kettle while they’re waiting for it to heat, and R, stepping out of the closet behind them where he’d been forced to stow the plethora of well wishes that his coworkers had left on his desk the day after, hums thoughtfully before retreating back to his desk to finish clearing it off.

Eventually, Imogen and Rhys settle down enough to get back to work. Eventually.

“I received a call from M earlier today asking me if we’d taken to killing people down here, the screams were so loud.” Q pulls him into his office to tell him later that evening. “All I ask is that you try not to terrorize the other _too_ much, my boy. They’re an easily excitable sort down here, you should have seen them arguing over the structural integrity of that get-well card edifice they left on your desk this morning. Diagrams were drawn, I believe.”

“I’m not _trying_ to, they’re just remarkably easy to startle.” R concedes after a moment, tapping a finger on the desktop thrice before adding, “do you think I should get a cat?”

“A cat?”

He stands abruptly up from the desk with a clatter and screech of metal against concrete, hand clipping out instinctively behind himself to stop the chair from toppling over from the kinetic energy. “Nothing, never mind. I’ll do my level best to stop sneaking up on my coworkers in the future, or at the very least ensure they don’t notice me doing it.” R pauses just at the doorway, making a fluttery, meaningless hand gesture in Q’s direction before asking, “Did you need me for anything else?”

Q considers him silently just long enough to make R feel as jittery as Rhys and Imogen no doubt were after that whole affair at the kettle, which is the worst sort of fair play in his opinion. Finally, though, the man speaks. “Merely to let you know that an Agent Ben Daniels was a particular fan of that tie pin number you put out last month and that he’ll likely be down at some point today or tomorrow to thank you in person.”

And then his heart is racing for another reason entirely.

Ben doesn’t manage to find his way down to them until the next day, giving R just enough time to properly steel himself for seeing the man again. No doubt the converse was true as well, because when the agent eventually _does_ call on him, shortly before lunch, they’re both perfectly cordial and wholly unfamiliar with each other in their introductions. R is deeply proud of both of them, really. And Tanner had the nerve to suggest he didn’t have a head for undercover work.

“Look, let me take you to lunch.” Ben says after the requisite pleasantries have been exchanged and Edmund and Eloise at the table nearest to them have apparently deemed the agent harmless enough to return to their work with only minimal eavesdropping on their parts now. “I would have been dead twice over on my last mission without that tie pin and I’d like to thank you properly, if you’ll have me.”

Eloise titters softly into her hand until Edmund elbows her in the side, and then they’re both arguing in hushed, sibilant voices and far too distracted to notice when R leaves with Ben shortly after.

R takes Ben to his flat to eat so they can talk in peace without having to worry about the wrong ear’s listening in. Outside of Q or M’s own homes, it’s one of the most secure buildings in the country, though considering he’s personally been forced to dismiss two separate incursion alarms at M’s residence after being informed that the intruder was one of their own agents, R is tempted to strike M from that list entirely.

Granted, his marked lack of any real furnishings yet outside of necessity leaves him hesitating in the doorway for a beat before reluctantly letting the man in, but Ben simply takes a look in the kitchen, confirms its barren status, and turns back to R to ask, “Shall we order in, then?”

They wind up eating directly out of the take-out cartons, set cross-legged in the center of the den, sleeves rolled up and ties slung over one shoulder to avoid getting sauce on anything. R idly makes notations on an assignment next to him in between bites and waits for Ben to begin.

“I want to apologize, kid.” Ben finally says, setting his own carton to the side and resting his hands in his lap to give R his full attention. 

He really wishes people would stop choosing to initiate difficult conversations with him like this, particularly the ones that know him quite well. Evasion is immeasurably more difficult to achieve without any distractions, after all, and that’s always been his strongest defense when no offense was afforded to him. Still, bad habits truly are the hardest to break. “For eating the last spring roll?” He asks lightly. “You should be. You had best be prepared for me to hold this insult against you for at least the next twenty-four hours.”

“Alex…”

“Is _dead_.” R interrupts firmly, giving the agent a quelling look. Even his security wasn’t completely infallible after all, and if nothing else he’d like to avoid getting a scolding from Tanner for this indiscretion tomorrow. “Did you get a chance to go to his funeral? Was it a good service?”

Ben’s look back is just as sharp and unflinching, though after meeting R’s eyes directly that gaze flickers momentarily to confusion (likely he just noticed the green) before his entire posture slumps in resignation and he lets out a heavy sigh. “There wasn’t any service, or at least, none that I was told of. Nobody would tell me anything. Do you understand? You just disappeared. I was going mad with worry, and then suddenly I hear talk around the building of some new whiz kid down in TSS that Q had brought in _personally_ , and I remembered all those lessons you’d had with the man. And I let myself hope. But I didn’t know for certain until I received that RFID key tie pin that doubled as an explosive. You always did like your explosions.”

“It’s not that I _like_ them.” R feels the need to protest faintly, though the faint sketch of a smirk forming on his face spoils the effect slightly. “I’ve simply found them to be fundamentally indispensable in this line of work. And a thoroughly satisfying form of stress relief, which I understand can be a serious problem for field agents.” He reaches across the way to snag a fortune cookie from the bag and cracks it open, discarding the fortune to the side without even bothering to look at it. “Psych should be lining up to thank me for all the free therapy I’m supplying you lot with.”

“One,” Ben says, stabbing a hoisin sauce stained chopstick so close to R’s face that’s he’s forced to lean back onto his elbows to avoid the splatter, and still manages to get a bit of the stuff on his glasses. “Explosions are not free. Clearly Q hasn’t had the ‘budget conversation’ with you yet. Two,” He uses those same chopsticks to snag up R’s discarded fortune while he’s distracted with the mess on his glasses and gives it a cursory glance before shrugging and tossing it back into the bag. “They’re lining up alright, but from what I’ve heard it’s certainly not to _thank_ you.”

“Yes, well they’ll have to catch me first and I chose my shoes for running. I doubt they can say the same.” R says, pulling his glasses from his face and licking the lenses clean before drying them on the front of his cardigan and replacing them on his face with a certain sense of triumph. Only to find the agent staring at him with an expression of sheer disbelief, nearly bordering on despair. “What.”

“Nothing. Just… nothing.” Ben says with a shake of his head that says it clearly isn’t. “We should get back before one of your admirers decides I’ve kidnapped you and puts a bounty on my head.” He says, gathering up all of their garbage and standing before R can even think to open his mouth to argue.

R narrows his eyes irritably up at the agent for a moment before deciding that, diverting joke or not, the possibility of someone in Q branch getting a little overexcited and jumping the gun was probable enough to merit their immediate return. Trying to get answers out of the agent now would take time they truly didn’t have.

 He gets his answer anyway early the next day, when Tanner pulls him aside before he can make his way down to TSS and all but begs him to never lick his glasses in front of anyone ever again. So of course, R makes a point of doing just that half an hour later at his desk over a nonexistent smudge, and the results are every bit as satisfying as he could have imagined.

Cerise actually _cries_ at the display, and Q is forced to pull him into his office again for another conversation about traumatizing his coworkers. This time, however, the lecture literally consists of him laughing for six minutes straight, which R decides to takes as the man’s blessing, overall.

* * *

 

Over the next handful of months, Ben breaks a total of seven very expensive pieces of equipment (some, multiple times) and somehow finds a way to flood his work computer with dozens of malevolent viruses. He brings each and every one of these problems directly to R at his desk with a self-satisfied smile and refuses to leave until the problem has been resolved, content to sit next to R while he works and supply most of the conversation, tea, and snacks. R responds intermittently when it feels like the man is asking him a direct question, rather than simply a hypothetical. Mostly he concentrates on his work though, determined to not only fix the item in question, but to improve it enough that Ben won’t be able to break it again.  Sometimes, he even succeeds.

TSS starts yet another betting pool on the nature of Ben’s courtship of him, but R laughs himself into hysterics every time the agent attempts to bring the subject up, so he still doesn’t know the details of that particular flight of fancy and would honestly prefer to keep it that way. Ben merely shrugs and mutters that there are worse covers, and then goes back to attempting to needle R into going to see a film with him after he comes back from his next mission.

And then M calls them both into her office and tells them this has to stop. For the budget’s sake, if nothing else. She assigns Ben as the official TSS prototype tester instead, which seems a neat sort of solution even if R personally believes that encouraging the man’s newfound destructive tendencies will only lead to ruin in the long run.

“I’m not even that bad.” Ben insists anemically while simultaneously managing to highlight three separate weak joints in some sort of tripod apparatus that was supposedly a grappling hook, but currently more closely resembled a sad, broken umbrella. “At least I bring back all the pieces when I break something. Apparently, agent Bond has a habit of just throwing things into the nearest body of water and calling it a day.”

“Are you expecting gratitude for leaving fried hard drives on my desk like a stray cat leaving mouse heads on my doorstep?” R asks blandly without looking up from his work.

“Is a cat leaving you dead mice at your flat?” Ben asks with a disproportionate level of interest considering the subject in question, leaning in over R’s shoulder to get a look at his face with a penetrating stare.

“No. Maybe. You’re blocking my light.” R presses a palm flat against Ben’s forehead and shoves him forcefully back out of his space. “Don’t try to change the subject by bringing up other agents, we’re talking about _your_ indiscretions right now. I’ll deal with Mr. Bond’s in his own time.” He turns around to leave the work table pressed against his lower back, leveling a censuring look at Ben. “Now what do you have to say for yourself and your wanton path of destruction?”

“I’d say try not to choke on your own hypocrisy, and also I think I’d like to hear a bit more about this cat that’s taken to courting you at home.” Ben says, sounding far too delighted with the nonsense coming out of his own mouth, and placing one hand dramatically to his own chest as if to swoon. “How could you keep that from me, I thought we had something special here.”

“Don’t tell me you’re jealous of a cat now.”

Ben brings that same hand up to his face and taps his chin consideringly. “I guess that depends entirely on how far you’ve gotten with it yet.” He decides eventually. “Which isn’t nothing if it’s already taken to leaving you small tokens of affection. What did you do, let it sniff your fingers, give it a cursory neck scratch, leave food out for it?” The agent doesn’t give R a chance to respond before he’s shaking his head at the last one. “No, couldn’t be, you don’t have any food at your place.”

Something in R’s expression must flicker, something in his eyes must show, because Ben stills abruptly and stares.

“ _Don’t_ you?”

R pushes himself up and away from the table and past Ben in one quick, forceful motion, striding back over to his desk and keeping the man firmly at his back. “I think it’s time you got back to your other duties, don’t you, Agent?” He says airily, but there’s a slight flutter to his voice that he can’t quite manage to quash and Ben hones in on it immediately like he’s scented prey.

Lunges in for the kill. “You actually went out and bought milk just for the cat, didn’t you?” He declares without a hint of question in his tone. And honestly much too loudly as well, considering they’ve had nearly the entire room’s undivided attention for the past two minutes at least. R risks a quick glance back over his shoulder to discover that Ben hasn’t made any sort of attempt to follow R in his retreat across the room, but even that distance does nothing to disguise the infuriatingly fond smile strung across the length of his face like a banner. “You giant _softie_. Who could have guessed that cats were your secret weakness all this time, huh?”

He chews mutinously on a few possible responses, willing his expression back under control and studiously ignoring the swell of excited whispers surging up around him. Finally, he settles for pointing sharply to the exit and fixing Ben with an especially eloquent look that he’d spent hours perfecting in a mirror so many months before.

Ben exhibits a level of self-preservation heretofore unseen and starts for the door without a sound of protest. He does, however, pause momentarily just in the doorway to tentatively inquire, “are you really going to do something about Bond?”

“Good _bye_ , Agent Daniels.”

TSS is nearly deathly silent following his departure, and R takes his time scanning his gaze across the length of the room, pausing to meet each and every person’s eyes momentarily before sighing heavily and collapsing into his chair with a clatter, planting his elbows squarely on his desk and his face in the palm of his hands.

It’s a good several minutes before he can muster up the energy to speak again, words slightly muffled. “If anyone wants to get into traffic and make sure Agent Daniels hits a steady stream of red lights, it would be much appreciated. Also, barring direct orders from M herself, he’s not to be allowed back down here for at least a week.”

Of course, Ben was due to leave on a mission in two days that would take at least that long to complete, but it’s the principle of the matter, really, and anyway there comes a point where he’s just punishing himself instead. Anything that prevents the agent from stopping by TSS after his post mission debriefing so R can confirm for himself that Ben’s still alive and in one piece falls firmly into that category.

“And can someone please get me a cup—ah.” R finally manages to drag his head up, only to find a mug of tea already steaming pleasantly by his elbow. He sighs again, happily this time, into the warmth of the mug and says fondly, “Thank you. When I finally do snap and decide to destroy all of MI6, you lot will all be spared.”

Only a few people laugh at the proclamation, the sound scattered and hesitant and petering off into uncomfortable silence. After about the fifth time of it, Q branch has rather started to suspect that he isn’t actually joking when he says things like that.

Imagine that. It’s almost as if they’re learning.

* * *

 

It takes Bond another two months to come storming down to TSS in a tizzy, shouting for Q and stomping about the place as if he owns it. R hovers at the entrance of the break room to watch the enfolding spectacle, sleeves pulled down over fingers carefully wrapped around his mug to obscure the lettering on it. Idly, he brings the mug up to his lips to take a sip as Q steps out from his office with a genial greeting, asking the agent “what can I do for you today?”

“You can point me at whichever inept lackey of yours decided to give me self-destructing gear for my last mission, Q. That’s what you can do for me.”

A ripple of dawning realization spreads through the staff, and R finds himself abruptly crowded out of the doorway by Rhys and his needlessly wide shoulders as the man steps back to fill the space and successfully conceal R entirely from view. R huffs a bit in exasperation. “This is hardly necessary.” He mutters, and then promptly abandons all sense of dignity and decorum and attempts to steal a glance at the proceedings outside by standing on his toes.

For all the bloody good it does him. Rhys is a maddeningly large person, really.

“Are you certain it wasn’t operator error?” Q inquires as kindly as one could possibly hope to suggest that one had very nearly blown themselves up through their own ineptitude. A technique R resolves to perfect himself in time, because it’s absolutely _brilliant_.

Agent Bond is forced to spend a good thirty seconds mustering up any sort of coherent response, and it serves to thoroughly rob him of much of the forward momentum of his righteous anger. “ _Yes_ , Q, I’m quite certain, seeing as how I wasn’t even using it at the time.”

“Did you really give agent Bond exploding equipment?” Rhys asks in a hushed voice, turning his head to speak to him over his shoulder and apparently entirely unbothered by R’s attempts to all but climb him in order to catch a glimpse of more than the agent’s rigid back.

 “Only a little one.” R answers back mostly in distraction. “Though it shouldn’t have exploded until he went about throwing it into a river. Did he try to take it in the bath with him or something?” He needles at Rhys’ ribs with the fingers of his free hand. “Rhys, ask him if he tried to bathe with it.”

Rhys catches his hand in a firm, but gentle grip and shakes his head imperceptibly, hissing through gritted teeth. “Are you mad? I’m absolutely not going to ask him that.”

“Fine, I’ll ask him then.” R says. Shoves his mug at Rhys’ hand with a quick, “hold this for me, would you?” and promptly lets go, forcing the man to choose between releasing R’s hand or allowing the mug drop to the ground. It’s not even a choice really. Q branch loves that mug. And now, with two free hands and a suitable distraction, R shouldn’t have any trouble at all getting the agent’s attention. “Did you take it in the bath with—mmph.”

Theoretically, anyway.

Sophie, who had been set quietly at the break room table this entire time, and who as a result had managed to completely slip R’s notice, slinks up behind him to cover his mouth with one hand and drags him back into the pantry behind them in a move so smooth it can’t be anything other than rehearsed, and seconds later agent Bond pushes his way past Rhys into the break room, demanding to know who had just spoken.

And poor Rhys is forced to ask Bond about baths after all, seeing as how he’s seemingly the only person currently standing in the break room to ask it. He stutters through something about the possibility of water shorting the equipment out, and R would be almost impressed with how quickly the man thinks on his feet, if he wasn’t so distracted considering the possible merits and drawbacks of licking Sophie’s hand in order to get her to let go.

“… it was raining.” Bond finally says, slowly, suspiciously. Pauses for a beat and asks, “is that your mug?”

“What? Er, yes.” Rhys stammers hopelessly, because he may be _irritatingly_ large, but his nerves were quite fragile even on a good day, and a good day in the Q branch almost never involved angry field agents come a calling. “R for Rhys. My name. That is. Is Rhys.”

“Uh huh.” Bond says, sounding dubious, and truly Rhys should know better than to try and lie to trained field agents when he can’t even manage to pull anything over on his three-year-old daughter. “Don’t we have an R on staff now? I think I remember M mentioning something about that.”

What on earth was M doing mentioning him to random field agents, anyway? Unless, of course, Bond wasn’t so random after all? R tries to recall if he ever bothered to find out the name of the agent that had been breaking into M’s home, but aside from Ben he’d been making an effort to avoid learning anything strictly outside of the professional realm about any of the field agents, and honestly he’s beginning to regret that decision a bit now.

“Er, yes. Well, no. That would be me. It’s a something of an in joke down here, I’m afraid.” Rhys says, and of course, when R said it a month ago, everyone had simply stared at him in baffled despair, but the moment he’s out of sight it’s suddenly a marvel of modern humor and he doesn’t even exist anymore.

“So that’s what passes as a joke down here, is it?” Or not. On second thought, Rhys can keep the damned joke. And the letter R, even, it’s not as if he’s particularly attached to it or anything. He can be S, or T (or maybe even U, and wouldn't that be fun to hear bandied about TSS like a poor man’s ‘who’s on first’ riff, before growing extremely tiresome after all of about a day). “Q, you should really think about making sure your minions get a bit more sun, they’re all going batty.”

“I’ll be sure to add it to the docket for our next branch meeting.” Q says indulgently, though a second later he adds pointedly, “Along with increasing the security to keep out uninvited guests.”

“Is that a regular problem down here?”

“Oh, some days more than others, certainly.” Q is clearly enjoying himself, which is fine, _truly_ , R wants nothing but the best for the man after everything he’s done for him. Only, if he could just wait until R wasn’t currently stuck inside a _pantry_ , he would be deeply appreciative. Pantries were meant to hold food, not people, after all, and it’s getting quite cramped in here now with two of them; even if Sophie is barely five foot in heels and R has yet to successfully put back on any of the muscle mass he lost before the accident.

At least he’s taken the burden of lying off of Rhys’ poor shoulders, though between the ebb and flow of Q and Bond’s comfortable banter, if R strains the limits of his senses (and there’s very little left for him to do, since he’s ultimately decided against the licking option, if only so that he can bring himself to look Sophie in the eye again later), he thinks he can _just_ hear the man take a distracted sip from his mug.

Which is a pity really, because R is generally quite fond of Rhys and now he’s going to have to kill him.

Just as soon as Sophie deigns to let him out of this pantry, anyway.

* * *

 

Sophie doesn’t let him out until Bond is a full two floors up according to Cerise and her careful eye on the building’s CCTV feed, by which point R’s boiling fury at Rhys despoiling his tea has simmered down into merely tepid disappointment and he settles for giving the man a baleful look, snatching the mug back, and prompting him with a low, “Rain, was it? Clearly I need to adjust the reaction levels. Help me run some numbers?”

Rhys nods and follows him to a worktable without a word. There’s a cupcake waiting on his desk when he eventually pulls his head out of a sea of calculations, a little frowning face drawn on the napkin beneath it in blue felt tip pin. An apology from Sophie, no doubt.

A pity her cupcakes are nearly inedible.

Like a shark scenting blood, Ben shows up in TSS the next day to take him to lunch. Considering the last R had heard he was still stuck in Tunisia waiting for an extraction, that was quite an accomplishment.

“Yeah, I can’t imagine you get many mission updates in the pantry.” Ben says in answer, which isn’t any sort of answer at all, but _does_ tell him that Ben has been back at least long enough to gossip with the others.

And that someone down here clearly has far too much free time on their hands for said gossip. “Hilarious. Who snitched.” He demands sourly, closing his eyes and pinching the bridge of his nose to stem off a coming headache. When he opens his eyes again, there’s a fresh mug of steaming tea waiting at his elbow and Ben is giving him a faintly disbelieving look. “What.”

“Nothing, just…” He shakes his head and smiles wryly. “You’ve got them trained good down here is all. It hasn’t even been a year yet, has it?”

“Not bloody well enough if one of them told you about the pantry.” R mutters into the rim of his mug and letting it linger there so he can inhale the warm, bitter scent. “I don’t know, clearly it’s been long enough for me to have developed a caffeine dependency. What month is it again?”

Ben gently tugs the mug out of his hands and sets it just out of R’s reach on the far corner of his desk. He holds both of R’s hands in his own and looks into his eyes, because he knows it makes the others do that odd scream whispering thing that R only pretends not to hear because he doesn’t want to have the conversations that would be required to acknowledge it. “Kid, I mean this truly and deeply from the very bottom of my heart… you know you’re not helping Q branch’s image any when you say things like that, right?”

“I have never in my _life_ claimed to be helpful.” R insists, casting a longing look in the direction of his tea.

“I suppose it depends entirely on how you qualify helpful.” Ben muses idly, still holding R’s hands because he seems to be ideologically opposed to allowing R the chance to get anything approaching work done whenever he comes by to visit. “Did you really try to blow Bond up?”

“ _Try_ is such a specific word.”

“So you accidentally blew him up then.”

R slumps forward across the desk in exasperation, laying awkwardly on his own hands since Ben still refuses to relinquish them, or else has simply forgotten that he’s even holding them. He’s still no closer to getting his mug back and that headache has begun creeping back in with a vengeance. “I don’t see why everyone is so determined to dwell on this, it was a _very small_ explosion. Clearly it wasn’t that bad if he had the energy to come down here and complain about it, you lot all like to act like we’re contagious down here or something.”

Ben gives a very pointed look at where their joined hands are wedged awkwardly beneath one of his shoulders, and doesn’t say a word.

Well at least now R knows for certain that Ben hasn’t forgotten about the hand situation. Which means he can be freely absolved for addressing said situation by digging his fingernails deep into the flesh of Ben’s palm until the man is finally forced to let go. R has the still warm mug back in his hands a second later, and bares his teeth in Ben’s direction as a warning that the next time the agent tries something like that there’s going to be far more biting involved. “Not you, obviously. But you were infected ages ago.”

“ _Ow_.” Ben says significantly, flexing his hand once and checking it for blood before stowing it away safely in his lap. “Look, all I’ve eaten today are some of M’s mints, so are we going to get food or do you just want to sit here some more and nurse your fragile ego? Because I have other friends I could eat with, you know.”

“Darren isn’t your friends, he’s just afraid of you.” R says blandly, reaching into a drawer of his desk to pull out Sophie’s cupcake from yesterday and pushing it over to Ben. “He cries every time you leave. And it’s not an ego thing, I’m just frustrated with how overprotective everyone is being down here. I’m perfectly capable of handling one unruly field agent.”

“That’s not how boffins express affection? Crying?” Ben asks, taking a bite of the cupcake and grimacing instantly. “This is horrid, I think someone is trying to poison you.” He says, sliding it back across the desk in R’s direction. “Here, try a bite.”

R chooses to tip the desert into the wastebin at his knee instead. “Nobody has the heart to tell Sophie to stop, really.”

“Isn’t Sophie the one who…” The agent trails off, gestures vaguely at R, and then more firmly in the direction of the break room.

“Assaulted me? Yes, just the one. Her way of apologizing, if you can believe it.”

“Around here?” Ben says, gesturing at the entirety of Q branch, and then more specifically at R himself. “Sure I can. Why do you think I always insist on eating out? There’s _acid_ stored next to the tea bags in your break room.”

“It needs a dry, dark place to set where it won’t be disturbed.” R says with a minute shrug of his shoulders. “The pantry seemed to fit all of those requirements, up until yesterday. I’ll have to find another place for it now, I suppose.”

Ben huffs out a rueful breath that could almost be construed as a laugh. “Of course you were the one to leave it there, I should have known. You do so love to stir up the pot.” He flicks one finger lightly against R’s mug, R making a displeased sound and pulling the mug closer to his chest and consequently slopping a bit of the tea onto his sleeve. “Is that why nobody ever lets you make your own tea around here?”

R considers the wet spot on his cardigan with a moue of displeasure, shaking the wrist ineffectually away from himself like that will somehow manage to slough off the damage. “Are you asking if they’re afraid I’m going to put acid in my tea, agent Daniels?” He says drolly. “I’m afraid that not even _my_ self-preservation instincts are as bad as all that.”

“Attempting to provoke an already riled field agent would suggest otherwise, kid.” Ben says, handing him a napkin and posture settling in his chair in a way that intimates that this particular conversation is the one that he originally came down here to have today. “It’s not like you to be that reckless. Not recently, anyway. You wanna talk about it?”

“Don’t be so dramatic.” R says, applying the napkin in light dabs to his sleeve and rolling his eyes. “I wasn’t trying to provoke anyone, I only wanted a conversation. Preferably over how to fine tune the self-destruct trigger on his equipment, but I wouldn’t have been picky about it really. I _might_ have even apologized for the misfire, if everyone else hadn’t completely overreacted like they did. Ugh.” He drops his head back to the desk with a dull _thunk_ , glasses digging sharply into the bridge of his nose. “He probably thinks I’m afraid of him or something now, Rhys is a terribly liar.”

Ben rests a hand lightly on the crown of his head, prepared to pull it away again in an instant if R shows the slightest sign of resorting to his teeth, but, somewhat magnanimously he feels, R decides to allow it for now. “Are you going to tell me why you wanted to talk to him so badly?”

R turns his head slightly sideways. Not enough to dislodge Ben’s hand, but at least to make his answer a touch more comprehensible by not being spoken directly into the polished wood. “It didn’t really have to be him _personally_ , how could it, I know nothing about the man aside from the whispered boogeyman stories and a growing suspicion that he might actually be even more of a bane to M’s existence than I am.”

Which _did_ rather make R want to speak to the man specifically, but admitting as much now is hardly going to serve him in his defense and he’s perfectly capable of biding his time for now. Wait for everyone to forget, to relax their guard. It always happens eventually, and if there’s one thing that working for MI6 has taught him through the years it’s how to play the long game.

Well, that, and how to learn to live with disappointment. Remarkable how interchangeable the two could be at times. “I admit that I’m starting to go a bit stir crazy down here, as of late. The only people I speak to outside of the delivery boy are you, Q branch, and Tanner when I’m trying to convince him that I’m far too busy to possibly talk right now, truly, but let’s schedule something for next week, leave a message with my secretary would you?”

“You don’t have a secretary.”

“And I’ve yet to be forced into the painful farce of conversing with Tanner for more than five seconds at a time, so I fail to see a problem with that.”

Ben scritches his hands gently through R’s hair, finding small tangles and easing them out and doesn’t say a word for a good minute at least. R is just beginning to entertain the notion of a nap, proper resolution to their discussion be damned really, when the man finally speaks again. “You realize that you were the one making an effort to avoid everyone else at MI6, right? Idris told me about you programming the elevator to ignore calls on other floors whenever you’re in it, and you’re always sending your minions along to do house calls in the other branches rather than going yourself.”

“What is the _point_ in having minions if I’m just going to attend to every minor email virus catastrophe or loose monitor wire myself?” R grumbles, making a mental note to make sure Idris got more busy work from now on, if she had so much time to snitch on him right now. She’s probably the one that told Ben about the pantry as well. “I needed an adjustment period.” He offers as an explanation for his antisocial tendencies of late, since it’s the closest he can comprehensibly come to the truth without trying to dig up things that he’d resolved to leave dead and buried with Alex after his death. “One I’ve deemed no longer necessary.”

 “Yeah, well.” Ben moves his hand down from R’s head to pat his cheek just once, pulling his hand away again before R can actually decide what to do about said hand, save for raising his head up from the desk and giving the man a look a consternation. “Attempting to break that self-imposed exile with Bond of all people maybe wasn’t the right way to go about it. We’ll have lunch with some of the other agents today, if you’re so determined.”

“But not Bond.” R prompts, mostly the see the brief look of despair that flashes across Ben’s face before making way for exasperation.

“No, not Bond. Why are you so concerned with the man, anyway?”

R pushes himself up and away from the desk, throwing a shrug in with the motion for good measure and then stooping to grab his bag off the ground. “Honestly? Because all of _you_ seem so concerned with him. I admit that I’m curious.”

“Curious, _hell_.” Ben says firmly, pushing himself to his feet and grabbing R by the arm to lead him toward the elevator, obviously eager to take advantage of R’s inferred invitation to leave before he could possibly change his mind. “You’re just jealous that _you’re_ not the one making everyone so worried.”

“I could never be so petty.” R says airily, making no effort to wrest himself from the agent’s grip. Or, truly, to refute his accusation.

“Uh huh. I wouldn’t worry too much, kid, you make people worry plenty.” Ben tells him, pressing a button on the elevator that won’t take them straight to the entrance,

For a brief, dizzying moment R lets himself wonder if he truly is ready to take this next step in his integration back into society. But Ben’s hand on his arm is warm and steadying, and R lets himself center around that feeling, take a deep breath, and take a step forward out of the elevator when the door opens in front of him.

Only to be snatched up again and dragged bodily back into the elevator a moment later, Ben chuckling in his ear. “Woah, easy there. I like the show of initiative, but that isn’t our stop yet.” And then he nods at the woman stepping onto the elevator with them and says, “Doctor. Have you had a chance to meet R yet? He’s stationed down in Q branch.”

“No… I can’t say that I have.” The woman says slowly, eyeing R with the sort of predatory gaze that he’s quickly come to recognize in mental health professionals.

R has the startling and horrifying realization just as the doors close on them all that you can’t _run_ in an elevator, clever footwear choices be damned, and then he does something that he hasn’t done since Alex died, nearly a year ago: he swears. Loudly.

Ben laughs so hard that he has to sit down, that he has to properly struggle to get the words out to tell his agent friends all about it at lunch later, and actually sends out a companywide memo about the event the next day with enough typos in it to suggest he was still laughing as he typed it, and R quietly vows to test any and all future self-destructing equipment on him rather than Bond, who aside from throwing a bit of a tantrum down in Q branch over a few minor first degree burns had done nothing nearly so deserving as the man who actually had the nerve to claim to be  R’s friend.

Still, he writes ‘violent swearing’ directly beneath ‘licking glasses clean’ in the notebook he technically should have never brought home from hospital (but which MI6 is undoubtedly aware of and have yet to make any effort to remove from his possession), with a special note to reserve it for particularly special occasions, because the resulting distraction had been thorough enough for R to manage to entirely dodge the psychiatrist, and had actually led to the woman making a point of avoiding _him_ a week later when their paths happened to cross again.

Who needs explosions when you have a trick like that up your sleeve?

(R does. Obviously. There is nobody in TSS quite as talented with incendiaries as he is, and R takes a point of professional and personal pride in that fact, but there’s nothing wrong with a bit of variety sometimes.)

* * *

 

Habits develop, people get comfortable, and the days begin to blur. R continues to barrel through his schooling at a dizzying rate (sometimes literally even, on exam days, when he forgets to eat and consumes entire pots of tea by himself without reservation) and tackles familiarizing himself with the rest of MI6 with much the same fervor. Somehow, he manages to avoid ever crossing paths with agent Bond again, no doubt a coordinated effort of Ben and Q branch as a whole, but he’s far too busy to let that bother him for long. R gets to know the other field agents instead, their preferences and needs, what makes them tick. He buys dishes for his kitchen and a sofa for the den.

He keeps feeding the stray cat at his door.

On the first anniversary of his resurrection, R goes to visit Alex’s grave, stands on the mound of earth and stares down at the headstone and feels… nothing. He goes back home and sits on his front step and lets the cat he’s taken to calling Gregorovich in his head (but never out loud) press its face into his open palm and purr brokenly. Ben finds him on that step three hours later, after it’s started to rain and Gregorovich has chosen to abdicate to somewhere drier, and takes him out to get drunk for the first time in his life.

It’s a miserable experience and R honestly can’t see the appeal. So of course, he lets Ben talk him into trying it again for his second anniversary as well. There’s something almost beautifully ironic about feeling like death the day after a resurrection at least, and R makes a point of buying pots and pans before the second anniversary _specifically_ so he can bang them in his kitchen the next morning under the pretense of making pancakes, and make Ben rue his decision to stay over, rather than call himself a taxi the night before.

R doesn’t have the slightest idea how to make pancakes, obviously, but after hearing the word Ben is loathe to give up on the idea of them, and sets about teaching R instead. After he’s done throwing up in the loo and cursing him, anyway.

M starts sending R out on little delivery runs for emergency drop offs in the field. She doesn’t say _why_ he’s the only Q branch operative to make these trips, but she also doesn’t need to. The unspoken is implied well enough without it.

And still no sign of Bond.

Time marches on. R turns 19 (21, if anyone asks, though no one does anymore since he can’t even provide them with a birthdate for office celebration purposes if pressed) and Bond becomes the youngest Double O agent in MI6’s long, and deeply dubious history.

R receives orders to travel to Montenegro for a field consultation. “Against my better judgement, really.” M tells him tightly around a peppermint, sliding the necessary dossier across the desk to him. “But I’m hoping a shorter administrative leash will prevent him from leaving us with another Madagascar on our hands, and if anyone in this organization can keep up with him well enough to do so, it’s you.”

His eyes skim over the details, alighting briefly on the name ‘James Bond 007’ printed boldly near the top of the first page, and he presses his lips firmly together to stop a smile from forming in response.

Patience, it seemed, truly was its own reward in the end.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Alex is rushed through recovery and the crafting of an entirely new identity at a truly insane pace but honestly when you consider how quickly he was out of the hospital after getting shot in canon, MI6 is almost going easy on him this time around.
> 
> Also I don't know how this chapter got so long. People just wouldn't stop _talking_ , and by people I mostly mean Ben.

**Author's Note:**

> Canon divergent after Scorpia Rising- not Never Say Die compliant since I've yet to read it, though the line about trains is a nod to the cover of the book at least.


End file.
